Is There a Scientific Explanation for Justin Bieber?

By

Eric Felten

June 17, 2011

Popular tastes in music have long had the power to perplex. What can possibly explain the public's fascination with Madonna; the odd enthusiasm for Milli Vanilli; the stark raving madness over David Cassidy or Justin Bieber? Why does one bit of embarrassing fluff breeze to the top of the charts while a thousand other bits of embarrassing fluff sink into blessed obscurity?

ENLARGE

What makes them crazy for the latest pop sensation?
Snappers/Zuma Press

Go back 150 years and those very questions were already being asked. "I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which regulates the attainment of extreme popularity," lamented Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd in Fraser's Magazine. Popularity was "a very arbitrary thing," he observed, pointing to the outsize success in his day of a cockney ditty called "The Ratcatcher's Daughter"—a song "without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment, nothing but vulgar brutality." And yet, for all these manifest defects, it could be heard everywhere. Plus ça change.

What puzzled Mr. Boyd wasn't just the sheer awfulness of the entertainments the crowd liked, but that there was no sense to it. "I defy any person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture, is to become the rage," he wrote. Now, at long last, a professor at Emory University is claiming that, at least when it comes to popular music, he has harnessed the power of science to predict what will succeed and what will fail.

"We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity," proclaimed Gregory Berns, who styles himself a "neuroeconomist." The divination is performed with the help of a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI, scanning the brains of juveniles while they listen to demo records. Emory University plumped the findings with the bold headline, "Teen brain data predicts pop song success."

If true, this would be the equivalent of having tomorrow's stock pages today. Helpful, that. Determine what tickles the pleasure points of the adolescent id and you ought to be able to plot more efficiently how to separate teens from their money. How happy the wildcatters of the record business would be if, instead of drilling hundreds of dry holes to get one gusher, they had their own Top 40 version of seismic tomography.

But the data isn't quite the home run it's advertised to be. The best that the neuroimaging could do was to match up with about a third of the songs in the study that went on to modest sales. "It's not quite a hit predictor," Mr. Berns admitted. (Emory's science PR blog conveniently reserved that caveat for a few graphs into its presser.)

Even without the caveat, there's plenty of reason for some intellectual caveat emptor. It was just a few years ago that another high-tech method of predicting pop-music success was breathlessly announced. "Hit Song Science" was supposed to rationalize and revolutionize the chaotic search for gold records. The technology was said to have spotted the boffo potential in Norah Jones's 2002 debut disc, and promised to repeat the trick on demand.

One of the founders of the algorithmic school of hit prediction, Mike McCready, was still boasting in 2007 that his computers could analyze whether would-be chart-toppers were consistent with the "sixty mathematical patterns that hit songs have conformed to historically." Asked by NPR how robust his software's predictive powers were, Mr. McCready proclaimed, "The work that we do is very close to 100 percent."

And yet, somehow, with this miraculous money-printing machine in hand, the music business hasn't exactly enjoyed uninterrupted profits of late. Last year a chastened Mr. McCready told Businessweek, "We discovered we couldn't make the bold kind of claims we were hoping we could make with this technology."

I suspect the brain-scan methodology will meet the same fate. That is, if it even gets to the bold-claim stage in the first place. Hit selection by fMRI has yet to be demonstrated, let alone replicated, and it may soon go the way of cold fusion.

Which is just as well, the business of popular music being cynical enough. The mystery that is popular taste acts as a check, however modest, on the industry's manipulations and contrivances. The record exec pondering whether to abandon the last vestige of artistic standards may be hesitant to do so if for no other reason than that he can't be sure it will work. Why sully yourself for a mere gamble? But if the payoff could be guaranteed scientifically, is there any junk that, once computer certified, wouldn't be rushed to market? If only science could succeed in changing the sort of songs that light up the adolescent brain.

I guess it is some consolation that when it comes to finding junk music to market, humans still have the edge on our computer overlords. Eminem once explained his own personal methodology for identifying hits. "When I listen to a song a few times and it starts to become cheesy to me, that's when I know it could be a big record."

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